My intention this week was not to review today’s restaurant – so tiny, so untrumpeted it had slid off my radar. I was going to tell you about a well-respected restaurateur and food writer’s newish west London outpost in all its sunny glory.

Only it was bad. Not just a bit duff but actively bad. And I am so weary of tall-poppy-Avenger mode that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. (Restaurant spods will know who I mean anyway, normal people won’t care and the restaurant’s enthusiastic, leather-legging-clad clientele will pile in regardless as they’re not that bothered about eating.)

So a random tweet sends me scuttling to a Marylebone backstreet’s Verru, a place I’ve walked past a hundred times and dismissed because – and here I apologise for utter shallowness – I hadn’t read about it on Twitter. It must have PR (you rarely get lines such as ‘the tastes of Scandinavia with the discipline of French cuisine’ without it) but I must have fallen off the mailing list.

With its grey exterior and palette of varying degrees of sludge, it’s not exactly screaming for attention streetside, either. I find out later that the look is by DesignLSM, responsible for high profile outlets such as Galvin La Chapelle and Carluccio’s, so someone clearly has faith enough in the talent for serious investment.

That talent is Estonian chef and owner Andrei Lesment, an ex-heavy hitter at Pied à Terre, apparently. Perhaps that background explains the disparate nature of our lunch: my à la carte choices come with all the blobs, obsessive plating and flourishes of haute cuisine – ‘like those pictures in Caterer And Hotelkeeper magazine,’ comments the well-restauranted chum; while her dishes from the remarkably well-priced lunch menu (£12.95) are considerably more, well, Baltic.

Its website tells us the cooking ‘will merge Baltic and Scandinavian flavours’, so lots of dill and beetroot, gravadlax, caraway, Danish medisterpølse sausage and even muesli in the green salad (bizarrely, it works). But it’s more Lesment than any particular cuisine.

Many dishes feature an alarming number of constituent parts: ‘loin of Berkshire deer, crispy suckling pork belly, baked beetroot, rhubarb, treacle jus’, for instance. So it’s just as well he knows what he’s doing. The flavours in his simpler lunch dishes are clear as a bell: sweet, own-cured herring with a dollop of almost fluffy puréed beetroot and dill-laced potato salad; or an excellent slab of pork in a creamy sauce laden with what looks worryingly like frozen mixed veg (it isn’t, of course, and the dish tastes far nicer than it looks).

But it’s the more ambitious dishes that genuinely surprise. Small scallops, seared into a caramelly crust with almost translucent centres, come with cubes of ‘pigs trotter’ I’d swear are pork belly (but who cares when it’s this good?), blobs of nashi pear purée, a deep-green smear of bitter dandelion and a single squirt of red curry that improbably pulls the whole plateful together.

Thick collops of excellent, rare lamb come with so many different bits and bobs – peas; baby carrots, glazed and trimmed so that they stand to attention; toasted spaetzle, that northern European noodle/dumpling offspring; pinenuts; a fragrant slick of bergamot – that I anticipate car crash. Not even close. Only the lamb shoulder samosa isn’t all that: clumsy pastry, dry filling.

It’s not all beer and spaetzle, though. There needs to be a bit more customer love: we’re a little late and are reprimanded for being ‘no-shows’. When we ask what is ‘perfect Skandi soup’, we are told sternly: ‘It’s a secret.’ The place is weeny – only 26 covers. When we linger over our lunch, long after fellow diners have tottered off back to work, I hear strains of: ‘Are they still there?’ issuing from the kitchen. Maybe that’s the Estonian/Baltic/Scandinavian way.

Word must have got out because it’s busy. Good. Independents who flout trends and carry on their own merry, idiosyncratic ways deserve to be supported. When the food is as good as it is here, that’s no hardship whatsoever.